The album Just The Clothes On My Back is a collection of songs about long-running fictional character, Jack Reacher, performed by husband and wife duo, Scott Smith and Jennifer Ferguson Smith (Naked Blue) in collaboration with the character’s creator and sometime musician Lee Child.

‘Jennifer and I were fairly terrified in the beginning,’ Smith recalls. ‘We’ve done a ton of songwriting, and also run our own songwriting retreat and taught writing at other retreats as well. But we had no idea what to expect. All we could think about was that, while Lee has 300 pages to tell a story, we have to squeeze it all into three minutes. Not to mention how would we even broach a lyric disagreement with one of the world’s biggest best-selling authors if it came up?

‘Thankfully, it really couldn’t have gone any better. We landed in New York and the first day we mostly finished three songs. Lee adapted immediately to the shorter format, and we adapted immediately to ‘speaking’ in his character’s voice. Having been huge fans of his books made it easy to speak through him, and gave us an immediate focus of where we were going with it all. It was such an honour to work with Lee, and truly was one of the best experiences of our lives.’

The album was recorded and produced in the couple’s home studio that recently saw an Audient iD44 audio interface that join a legacy Audient product Mico, a two-channel microphone preamp, Smith now has his sights set on an ASP880 8-channel mic preamp, which will make The Wood and Stone Room ‘full-on Audient’.

Smith describes himself as a musician/songwriter/producer ‘in that order specifically’, avoiding the term ‘engineer’ as it ‘sounds too tech-y to be part of a creative venture’. Clearly proficient in the studio, however, he terms his studio ‘a quite simple, efficient, stripped-down set-up as I find myself doing mostly everything in-the-box’.

‘The iD44 has become the hub of the set-up. ‘It’s my main tracking device,’ he confirms. ‘For larger sessions, I slave extra channels via Adat/SPDIF. It also allows me to A/B my monitoring, and volume control my monitors, as well as functioning as my talkback through headphones. I definitely appreciate the sheer quality of the unit; the quality of the converters has definitely made my job easier as well.

‘My tracking sounds fantastic, and making mix decisions is so much better and faster by really, really, really hearing what you have to work with. It’s so much easier to pinpoint if and where there’s a problem.’

For the future, Smith has several of his own projects going on, including a full-length recording by Jennifer Daniels called Songs From The Locke Box and reggae/pop artist, Jade Tremba. As restrictions begin to lift, the Naked Blue duo are starting to play their own songs on tour again too.

Concurrently, Amazon has picked up and filmed a series based on Child’s Jack Reacher for future release.

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